Fields of Light

Documenting the changing Lincolnshire Landscape, threatened by a race to Net-Zero.

I have lived in Lincolnshire all my life. It is not a place of dramatic peaks or lakes, but of a "quaint, painterly beauty" defined by open skies and working fields. Historically known as "England's breadbasket," this county is now at the center of a massive national shift.

Currently, over 34,000 acres of agricultural land, much of it prime farmland, is earmarked for industrial solar development. These proposals are being fast-tracked as "Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects," (NSIPs) bypassing many local planning stages via the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.

Fields of Light is my attempt to document this profound change. It asks a difficult question: What happens when we transform our rural heritage into a static industrial "plant"?.

This project is not just about taking pictures of fields; it is about using the very elements of the conflict to create the art.

I use a historic 19th-century process called the cyanotype. This technique doesn't use ink; it uses UV light, the sun's own energy,to create the image. By using sunlight to expose the prints, I am allowing the sun to "co-author" the image of the very land it is being harvested to replace. Instead of paper, I print these images directly onto glass panes. This part was full of failures and learning before refining a recipe that I use throughout. The glass mimics the material of the solar panels themselves. By fixing the image of living crops onto cold, industrial glass, the artwork mirrors the "violent translation" happening to the landscape: turning a living ecosystem into a fragile, static commodity. The resulting images are deep blue "blueprints" of the landscape. They capture the "understated character" of the Lincolnshire fields, the hedgerows, the soil, and the traditions thats have lasted generations, before they are hidden beneath glass and steel.

To further bridge the gap between art and infrastructure, I have developed a prototype solar object. This lamps ispowered by the sun to illuminate the very cyanotype images the sun helped create, embodying the cycle of energy and erasure. This project explores the "land-use conflict" currently reshaping our region. It is a conversation about balance. While renewable energy is vital, the loss of "Best and Most Versatile" agricultural land raises questions about food security and our connection to the soil.

Through Fields of Light, I aim to create a visual archive of this liminal moment, a time when the land exists between a pastoral past and an industrial future.